Mike English: "A family-oriented research sabbatical in New Zealand - 'I'd recommend it to anyone!'"

Geography and Environmental Studies professor Dr. Mike
English spent the first six months of 2008 in New Zealand.

Lucky him.
Missed all that snow shovelling.

But life
was not all beer and skittles in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Rather,
English used his sabbatical as an opportunity to pursue his research on how
agricultural practices influence groundwater/surface water interactions. He
also took along his family – wife Sherry Schiff (a geochemist at UW) and four
children, aged 14 to 20.

“They all
wanted to go,” says English, and careful marshalling of Air Miles points
managed to get everybody as far as Los
Angeles before the meter started running.

They ended up in the city of Hamilton,
about 100 kilometres south of Auckland,
where the parents worked in an experimental agricultural research basin run by
NIWA – the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.The two youngest kids attended high school,
and the two eldest worked at a vineyard on South Island.

The NIWA
research station at Hamilton
dates from the 1940s when the government realized that a population of 65
million sheep was creating water quality problems for the country’s 2.5 million
people.

The
215-hectare basin at the research station has been divided into three
sub-basins for research purposes. One has been returned to natural native
vegetation, and subbasins of the other two have been altered in different ways
to determine ways and means of reducing direct loading of nitrate into the
surface streams. This includes reforesting some with fast-growing pine
(maturing in just 17 years) for eventual use as biofuel and planting others
with different types of crops and excluding or including sheep and cattle.

There are
500-600 sheep at the research site and another 150-200 beef cattle, says
English. Unlike Canadian farms, where livestock are to a significant degree
penned up in barns, the gentle New
Zealand climate allows the animals to
free-range throughout the year. This means, of course, that their waste is
instantly in direct contact with the soil, including nitrogen-loaded cattle
urine.

Keeping the
livestock out of streams is the first step in improving water quality, and
establishing two-metre zones of vegetation alongside the streams is the next.

Water samples are taken, English says, to determine the
proportional contributions of nitrogen moving from the sub-basins into the main
stream and how it changes during a storm event.

“We are
also determining the source of the nitrogen entering the stream,” he says, by
examining nitrogen isotopes to see if the source is sheep, cattle, fertilizer,
or occurring naturally from precipitation.

“Wehave 300 frozen samples to be analyzed,” he
says.

English is
no stranger to tracking nitrogen. He has been involved for some time in a
research project in the Strawberry Creek watershed near Maryhill (between Kitchener and Guelph).
Another research project is based at DaringLake, about 325 km north of Yellowknife, where he and
fellow researchers are studying snowpack hydrology and how this is related to
climatology.

Being in New Zealand “was very different” than being in Canada, English
says. Not only was there less snow to shovel and some very interesting beers to
sample, but his research allowed him to work with biologists and ecological
modellers. And the research itself was different.

“Field
scientists live in our own caves,” he says. “The research I was involved with
in New Zealand
was in a similar vein to that I do here, but with different geologies and sheep
instead of crops, so the chemistry was different.

“The people
were also different. There was a dynamic atmosphere. We had full access to
labs, to trucks. They basically said, ‘Do what you want to do’.”

English
rates his New Zealand experience “10 out of 10,” and not just professionally.
His 14- and 16-year-old daughters took high school courses they never would
have experienced here, “like a Grade 9 Maori course,” and they made a lot of
friends. “Each had several going away parties.

“There is a
community spirit there you don’t have here,” he adds. “They are very laid-back
people, and it was a community we could fit into reasonably easily because of
our research background.

“I’d recommend
it [a period of overseas research] to anyone,” English says.

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